Yuri Kochiyama Quotes

So, transform yourself first… Because you are young and have dreams and want to do something meaningful, that in itself, makes you our future and our hope. Keep expanding your horizon, decolonize your mind, and cross borders.

Life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.

Unless we know ourselves and our history, and other people and their history, there is really no way that we can really have positive kinds of interaction where there is real understanding.

I thought maybe this was the way we could show love for our country, and we should not make too much fuss or noise, we should abide by what they asked of us. I'm a totally different person now than I was back then. I was naiive about so many things.

It would be hard. After all, I'm working. I'm a mother. Number one, I'm a mother & housewife, so there's the house kind of chores. In the evenings, I might attend some meeting, & then late at night, I would be either writing to the brothers & sisters in prison or working on the leaflets of their cases. Then on the weekend, at least every other weekend, we'd visit the political prisoners...I mean everybody has their whole life & things they have to do at home. But I'll tell you, we were busy during this time. Every week, more brothers & sisters would be arrested. We were working on scores of cases at the same time--trying to keep up with visiting, writing, attending court hearings. If I could show you all the leaflets we made, you'd get an idea of how expansive the work was.

Activists from all over the world--the known & the unknown--would find their way to the Kochiyamas' Fri & Sat night open houses. 'People were everywhere, eating, talking, laughing, spilling out into the hallway [outside their apt]. People were even int he bathroom. You couldn't close the front door bc there were so many people inside,' recalled Herman Ferguson. The Kochiyamas' apt also became a central meeting place for the Movement.

In Yuri's early years of activism, [Mae] Mallory served as an important political mentor. Not only did Mallory have a visible leadership role, usually reserved for men, she also, remarked Yuri, 'taught me how to be a good Movement person. She was always on time, responsible & reliable, accurate in giving out information, and she wanted other people to be the same.